Looking Backward

Looking Backward: 2000–1887 is a utopian science fiction novel by Edward Bellamy, a journalist and writer from Chicopee Falls, Massachusetts; it was first published in 1888.

It was the third-largest bestseller of its time, after Uncle Tom's Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ.It influenced a large number of intellectuals, and appears by title in many of the major Marxist writings of the day. "It is one of the few books ever published that created almost immediately on its appearance a political mass movement".

In the United States alone, over 162 "Bellamy Clubs" sprang up to discuss and propagate the book's ideas. Owing to its commitment to the nationalization of private property and the desire to avoid use of the odious term "Socialism," this political movement came to be known as "Nationalism" — not to be confused with the political concept of nationalism. The novel also inspired several utopian communities.

Publication history

The decades of the 1870s and the 1880s were marked by economic and social turmoil, including the Long Depression of 1873-1879, a series of recessions during the 1880s, the rise of organized labor and strikes, and the 1886 Haymarket affair and its controversial aftermath. Moreover, American capitalism's tendency towards concentration into ever larger and less competitive forms — monopolies, oligopolies, and trusts — began to make itself evident, while emigration from Europe expanded the labor pool and caused wages to stagnate. The time was ripe for new ideas about economic development which might ameliorate the current social disorder.